[In the following essay, Brown argues that the compositions of Richard Wagner have been the principal musical influence on the novel, and he illustrates how Gabriele d'Annunzio and Thomas Mann used the musical device of the leitmotiv, as Wagner developed it, in their novels.]

For fairly obvious reasons, music has exerted considerably more influence on poetry than on prose fiction. By its very nature, poetry demands a constant attention to problems of sound, and thus is likely to suggest musical analogies to its creators. Also, except for narrative poetry (in which musical influence is slight) poetry demands the conscious search for form to a much greater degree than does fiction. Even if we ignore the great mass of fiction which is really a commodity on the market rather than a type of literature, the fact still remains that any narrative tends to become a framework in itself and to impose the form of its own characters, incidents, and relationships on the work which presents it. The writer must, of course, invent or select his narrative in the first place, but this process rarely involves the conscious preoccupation with more or less abstract form which usually falls to the lot of the poet.

Even more important is the distinction in scale between most fiction and most music. [The] poets who attempt sonata form usually work on a much smaller scale than do composers employing the same medium. The reverse is true of fiction, which, except in the short story, usually exceeds the ambitious musical work in length. The colossal type of novel which has been in vogue during the past decade has accentuated this difference. The short novelette is comparable to the symphony in its proportions and scale, but it has never been a widely cultivated form in the English-speaking countries. As a very broad generalization, we may say that there are two general literary types, the short and concentrated, and the long and diffuse. Novels and, to a lesser extent, dramas tend to fall into the latter classification.

It has been noted that one of the baffling characteristics of Wagner's music, to a person whose standards have been formed on symphonic literature, is its slowness of development, but this slowness simply keeps the music in step with the normal pace of the drama which it accompanies. By habit, Wagner mastered this type of stately composition on a grand scale and learned to practise it even in purely instrumental works.

In short, the Siegfried Idyll succeeds where practically every "Symphonic Poem," from those of Liszt onwards, fails. It is a piece of purely instrumental music, quite twice the size of any well-constructed movement of a classical symphony, and yet forming a perfectly coherent and self-explaining musical scheme. Its length, its manner of slowly building up broad melodies out of constantly repeated single phrases, and the extreme deliberation with which it displays them stage by stage in combination, are features of style that have nothing to do with diffuseness.… [Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis]

Wagner's music is, then, almost the only music constructed on the same scale as the larger genres of literature, and, like the very few truly great literary works, it achieves this vastness with a sense of inevitability and even economy of means.

In the light of these facts it is natural to assume that Wagner will be of more use to the writers of fiction than will other composers, and the facts will bear out this assumption. The principal musical influence on the novel, and even the novelette, has been the adoption of methods of construction developed by Wagner.

Other music has, of course, been of occasional and sporadic importance. Cadilhac's efforts in the direction of the symphonic novel were largely inspired by the symphonies of Beethoven. A host of writers with a passion for music have brought it into their novels as subject matter: even the famous "musical" works of E. T. A. Hoffmann hardly achieved more than this. And this writing about music shows the influence of music on literature to exactly the same extent that Lamb's "Dissertation on Roast Pig" shows the influence of cookery.

A more interesting experiment was made by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point. The title, a literal translation of the punctum contra punctum, or "note against note," of the early theorists, gives a fair indication of what the novel sets out to do. The plan is, briefly, one of complication, sudden shifts of subject and tone, and the playing off of incident against incident. Part of the complication, including the idea of having one of the characters an author who determines to write the book in which he appears, seems to be borrowed from one of Gide's novels. Perhaps it will be as well as to let the notebooks of Philip Quarles, Huxley's fictitious author, describe the method:

The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. […] But on a large scale, in the construction. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major Quartet. […]) More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem.

This is an exact description of the technique of the book. While Spandrell and Illidge are murdering Everard Webley in Philip Quarles' house, Philip is arriving at his parents' home to untangle the absurd situation of his fatuous and socially prominent father, whose pregnant secretary is threatening to tell all. In the affair between cheerfully amoral Lucy Tantamount and gloomily passionate Walter Bidlake we have a fine example of dissimilars solving the same problem, and the method is carried on in the tentative infidelities of Elinor and Philip, Mr. Quarles' pompous seduction (with full cooperation) of Gladys, and Burlap's seductio ad absurdum of Beatrice. The same principle is worked out in the deaths of Little Philip, of Webley, and of Spandrell, and the approaching death of old John Bidlake. Finally, the screeching parrot that interrupts a passionate scene between Walter and Lucy is probably a lineal descendant of the joke in the B flat major Quartet.

Early in Point Counter Point Philip Quarles suggests another possibility which is also mentioned further on in the passage just quoted; the author can assume various points of view about the characters and events of his story, shifting from the cynical to the sentimental, from the religious to the physiological. It is perhaps unfortunate that Huxley did not attempt this technique. As the novel stands it is a brilliant piece of work, but somewhat too ingenious, too much of ajeu d'esprit. The contrasts and parallelisms are cleverly managed, but the machinery is too obvious. The essential theory, of course, is Aiken's method of juxta-position except that, by having real characters and events instead of a succession in the mind, Huxley does give a sense of continuity: an action which has been left off half-way is being continued while a new one is described. In a literal sense he thus comes closer to counterpoint than does Aiken, but the suggestion of the musical analogy is not nearly so effective. Furthermore, for all its brilliance and ingenuity, Point Counter Point seems to have been a blind alley and to have made no contribution to the technique of fiction.

Wagner did make such a contribution in the Leitmotiv, and writers of fiction have only begun to exploit its possibilities. In a way this device has been known since the dawn of literature, and there is a certain amount of justification for considering the regular Homeric combination of an epithet with a noun—"the many-voiced sea," "the hollow ships," "Dawn, the rosy-fingered"—as a Leitmotiv. Similarly, one critic finds that the device was used, to some extent, well before the time of Wagner and, later, independently of his influence, by such writers as Goethe and Dickens. Sometimes, as in Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, the motives have been organic, but more frequently they have been mechanical repetitions of some descriptive or characterizing trait, like Mr. Micawber's constant statement that he is "waiting for something to turn up." There is no reason to think that such repetitions as this, or as the constantly repeated phrases of the folktale, owe anything to musical influence or are real parallels to musical devices. With the rise of Wagner, however, a number of writers felt a distinct musical influence and deliberately began to base some of their effects on Wagnerian music. Thus there are genuine Leitmotivs here and there in Zola, and the imitation of Wagner is unmistakable in the scene in Le ventre de Paris which describes the shifting, blending, clashing stenches of a cheese-shop in terms of Wagnerian orchestration.

A genuine Leitmotiv in literature is hard to define, for its existence is determined more by its use than by its nature. One might say that it is a verbal formula which is deliberately repeated, which is easily recognized at each recurrence, and which serves, by means of this recognition, to link the context in which the repetition occurs with earlier contexts in which the motive has appeared. (It will be noted that this definition, written entirely for the literary use of the Leitmotiv, will apply equally well to the musical use if we merely change verbal to musical.) Perhaps we should add that in both music and literature the Leitmotiv has to be comparatively short and must have a programmatic association—must refer to something beyond the tones or words which it contains.

Both d'Annunzio and Thomas Mann, different as they are in other respects, have come strongly under the influence of Wagner. Both have spoken of him with admiration, and by a striking coincidence (for it seems to be nothing more) both have written books which use Tristan und Isolde, played by one of a pair of lovers to the other from a piano score, as the climax and key. It is not surprising, then, to find that both have cultivated the use of the Leitmotiv, on Wagnerian principles, so extensively that critical studies of its use by each have been published.

D'Annunzio's novel Trionfo delta Morte (The Triumph of Death) illustrates very well his use of Leitmotivs. It is the story of a man and his mistress, Giorgio being something of a Hamlet-type (though a sensualist withal), and the mistress being a "prezioso strumento di voluttà" and little more. From the very opening chapter, in which they walk in the Pincio gardens and arrive at the parapet just after a man has killed himself by leaping off, Giorgio is haunted by the fascination of death. This early suicide becomes one recurring theme. Another is the recollection of the lover's uncle, who had also killed himself. A number of other motives are employed, such as the sound of men at work ramming down paving-blocks in the streets, Giorgio's mother's agonized question "For whom do you forsake me?" and the music (described in rather Wagnerian terms) of the sea. These themes serve to hold together the various episodes of the story, but they have an even more important purpose in keeping before the reader the state of mind of the man—the hypnotic fascination of suicide—which is a steady undercurrent and is the real subject of the book. Finally, after playing Tristan for Ippolita, Giorgio takes her for a walk by the sea, lures her to the top of a cliff, suddenly seizes her, and leaps off.

D'Annunzio's preface leaves no doubt as to the deliberateness or the ultimate source of his method. It speaks of the intention of representing the inner life of a character rather than merely a series of external events, of writing "a plastic and symphonic prose, rich in images and music." More specifically still, it says that the contemporary psychological analyst has, in the Italian vocabulary, "musical elements so varied and effective as to be able to compete with the great Wagnerian orchestra in suggesting what only Music can suggest to the modern soul."

Thomas Mann's use of the Leitmotiv is more skilful and extensive than d'Annunzio's, and worthy of more detailed treatment. Perhaps it is best seen in Tonio Krdger, of which Mann himself writes:

Here probably I first learned to employ music as a shaping influence in my art. The conception of epic prose-composition as a weaving of themes, as a musical complex of associations, I later on largely employed in The Magic Mountain. Only that there the verbal leitmotiv is no longer, as in Buddenbrooks, employed in the representation of form alone, but has taken on a less mechanical, more musical character, and endeavors to mirror the emotion and idea.

The later developments here mentioned are interesting, but the germ of all of them is contained in Tonio Krdger, and this novelette is far more convenient for purposes of illustration than are the vast novels.

Tonio Kroger, the son of a good bourgeois north-German father and a happy-go-lucky, musical Italian mother, has, during his adolescence, two attachments. The first is to Hans Hansen, a schoolmate who likes Tonio in a way, but shares none of his literary interests—who is obliging enough to promise to read Don Carlos because of Tonio's enthusiasm about it, but never does. Hans is really interested in his riding lessons and his books about horses. A description of a walk taken by the two after school one afternoon indicates their relationship. After this comes Tonio's first love, for Ingeborg Holm, "the blonde Inge." She is a feminine counterpart of Hans—gay, self-confident, a complete extravert. Magdalena Vermehren watches Tonio with dreamy admiration, but not Inge—she laughs at him for an awkward mistake in dancing-class, and he retires, abashed, to stand in the darkened hall outside and vainly hope that she will miss him and come to him. He promises himself that he will be true to her, whatever she may think of him, but as time passes he is shocked to find that love passes and such faithfulness is impossible.

Tonio's father dies, the house and business are sold, his mother marries an Italian virtuoso and disappears from his life, and he leaves his provincial home town in high scorn. When we next meet him he has achieved considerable reputation as a writer. He visits Lisaweta Iwanowna in her studio, and she stops her painting to have tea with him. He does most of the talking, disburdening himself of a long series of reflections. Artistic genius is not a gift but a curse. The artist must calculate his effects coldbloodedly, and thus must shut himself off from ordinary human warmth of feeling. He is a man apart, always wanting to mingle with his fellows as one of them, but never succeeding. In fact, art is probably an escape from some failing as a human being, and the artistic temperament is highly suspect. After all this, Lisaweta gives him her answer: he himself is simply a bourgeois on the wrong path.—Some time later, Tonio again visits Lisaweta and tells her that he is setting out to visit Denmark, traveling by way of his—he almost says "home," but changes to "starting point."

He stops by his home town very briefly, but long enough to look at Ingeborg's old house, to repeat the walk taken with Hans years before, to visit his old home and find that it is now a public library, and to be detained on suspicion at his hotel and almost arrested as a swindler. (After telling Lisaweta about a criminal banker who was an excellent writer, he had drawn the conclusion that no honest banker could be an artist.) Then he went on to Denmark, where he soon settled down in a seaside resort. Here he witnessed a dance held by a group of excursionists. He stood in the darkened passageway and watched longingly while two youngsters remarkably like Hans and Ingeborg enjoyed themselves. A dreamy-eyed, awkward girl (Magdalena!) slipped and fell; Tonio helped her to a chair, looked once more at Hans and Inge, and went to his room. "From below floated up to him, muffled and soothing, the sweet, trivial waltz-time of life."

He sat down and wrote to Lisaweta—not a narrative, but a general statement. He sees that he is a mixture of his father's bourgeois nature and his mother's artistic temperament. "I stand between two worlds but am at home in neither, and this makes it rather difficult for me. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeoisie want to arrest me—I don't know which group wounds me more." But he goes on to say that he accepts the mixture, that if anything can make a poet out of a mere man of letters, it is precisely this attachment to the human, the living, and the ordinary. "Do not scold me for this love," he writes, and (seeing now for himself what the author had seen in him as he returned from his walk with Hans years before) he concludes: "Longing is in it, and sorrowful envy, and a tiny bit of scorn, and an utter, pure happiness."

This summary of the action is sufficient for our purposes, though many details have necessarily been omitted. Before examining the use of the Leitmotiv, we should notice that the structure is clearly sonata form, the four paragraphs of the summary including respectively the exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. The exposition states separately the two themes of Hans and Inge. The development is devoted largely to the conversations with Lisaweta, in which the significance of these themes for Tonio's character and life is worked out. The recapitulation is devoted to Tonio's journey, though with the addition of some new episodes. Nevertheless, in the return to Tonio's home town, the childhood recollections, and the repetition of the walk with Hans we clearly have the recapitulation of the first subject; and (after a brief account of the intervening days) in the dance at the inn, even including the accident on the dance floor, we have the second. Finally, the letter to Lisaweta is a coda which sums up the whole thing.

The fact that a work based on sonata form can be an excellent example of the literary use of the Leitmotiv shows that musical analogies in literature are never exact. Yet the combination, strange as it seems from a purely musical point of view, solves very effectively the problem of repetition. To repeat exactly the opening chapters would have been both tedious and pointless, for the significance of the mature Tonio's visit to his home and his stay in Denmark lies in the fact that he now sees from a different point of view the experiences of his childhood. Nevertheless, the repetition is close when he relives these experiences, and the basic identity must be clearly shown. This is achieved by the repetition of short passages like the conclusion of the letter to Lisaweta. In the same way, the description of the blonde dancer at the seaside resort repeats phrases from the description which introduced Ingeborg Holm. When Tonio repeats the walk taken with Hans in his childhood, Mann repeats his account of that walk in essentially the same words, but with appropriate slight differences: "Then he left the promenade along the wall not far from the station, saw a train puff by in clumsy haste, amused himself by counting the cars, and looked at the man who sat on top of the last one." As children, Tonio and Hans had waved to this man.

These passages which are repeated in order to call attention to the essential unity of superficially different experiences are necessarily somewhat long. It may even be questioned whether they should be classified as Leitmotivs at all, for, because of the nature of the story, each of them is repeated only once. There can be no such question about certain shorter phrases which occur more often. Three of these, all connected in one way or another with Tonio's good philistine of a father, will show the method. The first is, to all appearances, merely a physical description: the father was "a tall, carefully dressed man with thoughtful blue eyes, who always wore a wild flower in his button-hole." This formula is repeated when Mann speaks of the father's death; and when Tonio, a literary man of note, lives in large cities, but finds no joy of heart there, it is suggested that perhaps his heredity from this identically-described father is responsible. Finally, when Tonio revisits his home (now a library), he thinks of his father in these same terms. Through these repetitions the motive gradually comes to stand for the bourgeois element both in the father and in Tonio. Its ramifications are seen, for example, when Lisaweta tells Tonio to sit down on a trunk in her studio, if he is not too afraid for his "patrician garments"; and he replies that as far as possible the artist ought to dress and act like a respectable person. (A similar description of "his dark and fiery mother, who played the piano and mandolin so beautifully" likewise comes to be a representation of the artistic side of his nature.)

The other two motives derived from the father both originate in an early passage which tells how young Tonio found his father's scolding of his artistic vagaries "more proper and respectable" than his mother's tendency to reward or ignore them. The boy went on to think (obviously quoting a lecture from his father), "We are not gypsies in green carts, but substantial people.…" This gypsytheme returns when Tonio, startled by Hans' repugnance for his foreign Christian name, thinks that there is always something different about him which makes him not quite acceptable to his fellows. It returns again, when he recoils from the escapades of Bohemian life. It appears for the last time when he considers revealing his identity to the police in order to prove that he is no swindler, no gypsy in a green cart.

From this same original passage is derived another motive, that of finding "quite as it should be" (sehr in der Ordnung) the attitude of the everyday world towards art and the artist. The exact verbal formula does not appear until later, but the connection with his secret approval of his father's condemnation in this passage is clear from the fact that its first two appearances (when he first returns to his home town, and later when he visits the house itself) are connected with the recollection of his father's lectures. The third use is in connection with the bourgeois distrust shown in the suspicions of the police.

Other important motives include the reference to the living heart (used five times) to summarize the world of warm and natural human relationships; and the contrasting reference to device and effect (Pointe und Wirkung) for the coldblooded calculation of the deliberate artist. Minor motives abound: books about horses, for example, not only refer to Hans Hansen's literary interests, but come to represent the general way of life of the sound extravert who has no need of literature. But a full listing of such motives would extend to inordinate length without contributing any new principles.

Various critics have attempted to classify literary Leitmotivs, but the results are not very convincing. The failure is not surprising, for the device is essentially a method of economy by which a short expression comes to stand for and to recall to the reader's mind an entire and frequently complex idea, character, or situation. Because of its very economy, then, a motive will frequently accomplish several different things at the same time. Since the classifications are based primarily on the use to which a motive is put, they necessarily fall to pieces in cases of multiple significance. One suggested grouping, for example, distinguishes between characterizing and structural motives, and in some very simple cases the distinction can be made. In Tonio Krdger, however, such a classification is meaningless. The description of Tonio's father is, from one point of view, purely a motive of characterization. Nevertheless, it is structural in that it connects one side of Tonio's own character with his father, and it is structural in an even more mechanical way when, as Tonio sits in that part of the library which used to be his own room, he thinks that another part now occupies the place where he sat at his father's deathbed. In this instance, the character of the father is hardly in question, and the purpose of the repeated characterization is simply to connect this visit more directly with Tonio's earlier life. Any really effective use of the literary Leitmotiv will similarly defy classification because of its multiple relevance.

The recent development of the Leitmotiv as a literary device is an example of reciprocal interaction between literature and music. The English riding coat was borrowed into French (with the Gallicized spelling and pronunciation) as redingote, and English has recently borrowed this form of the word back, Anglicizing the pronunciation and using it for something quite different from a riding coat. A similar interchange has taken place in the case of the Leitmotiv.… [The] musicians created it by imitating language—by giving an external significance to a group of sounds. But this group of sounds was, in most cases, longer and more impressive than a single ordinary word. Above all, it attracted attention to itself in a way that a single word cannot imitate except in such very rare cases as Macbeth's "this hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine." And since it thus attracted attention and called for recognition, it lent itself to a variety of uses in the handling of plot, characterization, and idea demanded by the programmatic music in which it was used. Seeing its usefulness, the writers then borrowed it back by creating, in imitation of it, a phrase which would be easily recognizable and could be employed in a similar way. They are still exploring its possibilities and finding new uses for it. Thus music would not have developed the Leitmotiv without certain antecedent suggestions from literature, and literature would not have developed it to anything resembling its present use without the example of music.